Aggada -- Translations into English; Bible. Old Testament -- Legends; Jewish legends; Midrash -- Translations into English
The third law revealed on this day was the command that the children of
Israel put out of the camp every leper and every unclean person. When
Israel moved out of Egypt, the majority of the people were afflicted
with physical defects and diseases, contracted during their work on the
structures they had been compelled to erect in Egypt. One had his hand
crushed by a falling stone, another's eye blinded by splashing of loam.
It was a battered and crippled host that reached Sinai, eager to
receive the Torah, but God said: "Does it become the glory of the Torah
that I should bestow it on a race of cripples? Nor do I want to await
the coming of another, sound generation, for I desire no further delay
of the revelation of the Torah." Hereupon God sent angels to heal all
among Israel that were diseased or afflicted with defects, so that all
the children of Israel were sound and whole when they received the
Torah. They remained in this condition until they worshipped the Golden
Calf, when all their diseases returned as a punishment for their
defection from God. Only the women, during their stay in the desert,
were exempt from the customary ailments to which women are subject, as
a reward for being the first who declared themselves ready to accept
the Torah. When the Tabernacle had been consecrated, God now said to
Moses: "So long as you had not yet erected the Tabernacle, I did not
object to having the unclean and the lepers mingle with the rest of the
people, but now that the sanctuary is erected, and that My Shekinah
dwells among you, I insist upon your separating all these from among
you, that they may not defile the camp in the midst of which I dwell."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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